Rubik’s Cube Cake Recipe

My friend Allison turned 27 yesterday and celebrated her birthday with a “cubed” themed party (3x3x3=27). To keep with the theme, I made an inside out Rubik’s Cube cake. Most rubik’s cube cakes have color squares on the outside, but this one has them on the inside!

Essentially this cake is made of 6 yellow-cake mini-cakes of different colors cut into 1″ pieces, “glued” together with buttercream frosting, then frosted all together to look like an unassuming cake. Until the first cut…

Rubik’s cube cake with colorful inside squares

Making & assembling the cake is simple but really is a lot of tedious work. I completed the whole thing over the course of two days – this is not a one day project.

Friday I baked all the cakes then let them cool over night. Saturday morning I made the frosting and cut all the pieces.

Saturday afternoon I frosted everything. Then once the frosting was all set and smooth, I moved the cakeboard to a box and prepared it for a short subway trip.

Thankfully taping the cake board to the inside of the box worked perfectly.

Colors

To dye the cake batter, I used Food Coloring Gel for the first time. These were very easy to use and meant less of a risk of accidentally modifying wet/dry ratios with liquid dyes.

To apply, I dipped a toothpick in the color, swirled it into the batter, then stirred it all up. The deeper the color, the more dye you will need. As you can see in the photos above, the colors baked a little bit darker than the batter too.

For the colors above I used:

Blue: 8 toothpick swirls

Green: 2 toothpick swirls

Orange: 3 toothpick swirls

Red: 12 toothpick swirls

Mini Cakes

I used a traditional yellow cake recipe to make the base batter, then split that into fourths. Converting any 8×8 baking pan into two is easy.

Simply line your pan with parchment paper but include a fold in the middle to split the pan into two. Add some aluminum foil under the fold to help keep it sturdy. This way you can put two different batters in one pan without them combining.

Since you do not need a full 8×8 cake of each color, the mini cakes work just fine (and are less work for you).

Assembly + Color Map

I cut each mini-cake into 1″ pieces (measuring each piece as I went along). This left me with 16 pieces in total. From there, I made the cake 4″x 4″. I kept the length the same (7″) for no reason in particular other than to have more cake.

To make it even more colorful, I mapped out the colors on paper soduku-style so no row or column would have a repeating color. Creating a guide like this is very helpful since once you start working with the pieces, things can get overwhelming quickly.

Frosting

I used a traditional chocolate buttercream frosting to “glue” the pieces together and to frost the outside. You can use frosting to “cheat” a little and fill in the spots where some of the pieces aren’t exactly the same size.

You can decorate the outside of course, but I liked the look of it appearing like a boring chocolate cake.

Om nom nom

Although the cake looked small, it easily served 20+ people by cutting each slice into three.

HOLY COWWWWWWWW… you are soooooo gooood!!!!!! I do not have the patience for this haha, or the creativity. I like to cook, but baking seems so difficult for me even though I use just as many ingredients for cooking. Good job :)